Rebecca Vassarotti, ACT Minister for the Environment, Parks and Land Management, will speak at a Parks and Conservation Service International Women’s Day Breakfast.

Today, women from the ACT Parks and Conservation Service will come together to celebrate their important rôle in changing how the ACT Government cares for people and the environment.

Women are the key to how we will improve our response to the climate crisis and gender inequality.

In the ACT Parks and Conservation Service, only 35 per cent of our staff are women.

Despite this imbalance, the fantastic work of our Parks and Conservation team serves to disproportionately impact women for better or for worse.

Women often hold many leadership roles in their families and in the community that places them at the forefront of climate disaster.

More often than not, in addition to their professional rôles, women are responsible for caring for children, the elderly, and the sick during extreme weather events caused by a rapidly changing climate.

That means that when we fail to tackle rising greenhouse gases with environmentally conscious land management, we fail to tackle gender inequality.

To put it simply, you could argue climate change is sexist.

We desperately need to put women in leadership positions so that the Government can bolster and improve our conservation efforts with different lived experience.

Diversity in leadership leads to better, more educated decisions – which means that diversity in leadership leads to better outcomes.

Like many public sectors, the Parks and Conservation Service has a glass ceiling. At the moment, men make up a comfortable majority of jobs in leadership.  

If women serve to be the most affected by climate change, then they deserve to be in leadership positions to affect how we respond to it.

In conservation, like in all sectors, it’s time to share leadership and ensure women are central to a new vision to preserve people and planet.

If you are interested in working in an environment, heritage or water rôle within the ACT Government, visit the Jobs ACT website.